Introduction

The G92 is currently NVIDIA's hottest (not temperature) GPU. It sells like mad on several different products like 8800 GT and 8800 GTS 512 MB. Since both of them are still fairly expensive and ATI has solid offerings in the $170 range, NVIDIA decided to create the GeForce 8800 GS based on the G92 GPU but with less performance features. They took G92 cores and disabled 24 shader units and 4 ROPs. The memory bus has also been reduced from 256 bit to 192 bit which explains the odd memory size of 384 MB.

EVGA being an early adopter has secured a large allocation of the 8800 GS and is one of the first companies to offer their products on the market. The card follows the NVIDIA specifications to the letter, other companies offer preoverclocked cards here for a small premium. However, as we will see later in the overclocking section there is no reason to spend any extra money on the factory overclocked cards.

Radeon HD 2600 XT

GeForce 8600 GTS

Radeon HD 3850

GeForce 8800 GS

Radeon HD 3870

GeForce 8800 GTS

GeForce 8800 GT

GeForce 8800 GTS

Radeon HD 2900 XT

GeForce 8800 GTX

GeForce 8800 Ultra

Shader units

120

32

320

96

320

96

112

128

320

128

128

ROPs

4 x2

8

16

12

16

20

16

16

16 x2

24

24

GPU

RV630

G84

RV670

G92

RV670

G80

G92

G92

R600

G80

G80

Transistors

390M

289M

666M

754M

666M

681M

754M

754M

700M

681M

681M

Memory Size

256 MB

256 MB

256 MB

384 MB

512 MB

320 MB 640 MB

512 MB

512 MB

512 MB

768 MB

768 MB

Memory Bus Width

128 bit

128 bit

256 bit

192 bit

256 bit

320 bit

256 bit

256 bit

512 bit

384 bit

384 bit

Core Clock

800 MHz

675 MHz

670 MHz

550 MHz

777 MHz

500 MHz

600 MHz

650 MHz

742 MHz

575 MHz

612 MHz

Memory Clock

1100 MHz

1000 MHz

828 MHz

800 MHz

1126 MHz

800 MHz

900 MHz

970 MHz

825 MHz

900 MHz

1080 MHz

Price

$90

$110

$170

$170

$210

$260 $350

$215

$289

$299

$439

$650

Complete Specifications

NVIDIA® Unified Architecture

Unified shader architecture

GigaThread™ technology

Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10

Geometry shaders

Geometry instancing

Streamed output

Shader Model 4.0

Full 128-bit floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline

NVIDIA Lumenex™ Engine

16x full screen anti-aliasing

Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling

16x angle independent anisotropic filtering

128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with anti-aliasing